YMMV / David Attenborough

• Awesome Music: All his documentaries, even the relatively obscure ones, have examples of this.
  • Life of Birds (the theme music and the birdsong).
  • The Life of Mammals theme isn't half bad either.
  • Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II are scored by Hans Zimmer.
  • The Hunt and Our Planet by Steven Price.
    • The Hunt in particular has two notable ones "The Bait Ball" and "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea".
  • Even the music from the trailer for Planet Earth ("Hoppípolla" by Sigur Rós) which became a hit single off the back of it, and was considered so iconic that a remix was used a decade later for the trailer to Planet Earth II.
• Creator Worship: The level of esteem in which he is held by his fellow Brits cannot be understated - he is pretty much the only British public figure who is universally beloved.
• Funny Moments:
  • Sir David has a run-in with a chatty Greater Bird-of-Paradise.
  • His Adele "Hello" parody. "We are about to witness one of the great phenomena of the natural world. The lesser-spotted Adele... with... Hello."
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The BBC farewelled him by creating a sheet full of fictitious programs crediting him and distributing it.
  • The ending to the "Courtship" episode of Life Story, when a male waved albatross recognizes his mate among a crowd of other albatrosses, greets her and then preens/nuzzles her.
  David: If love as we understand it exists in the natural world, then this is what it looks like.
  • After spending most of the series discussing man’s deleterious impact on the environment, Our Planet ends with an optimistic discussion of how the rewilding of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has helped endangered species like wolves recover.
  • In a 2019 interview, Attenborough was asked which animal was his favorite. His answer? "Human beings."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Jurassic Park starred Richard Attenborough in a movie about dinosaurs. Prehistoric Planet is about David Attenborough narrating a documentary about dinosaurs.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Hee-ah, in the Amazon Rainforest..."
  • The infamous scene of the baby seal walking along a beach; only to be eaten by a breaching killer whale. The scene was entirely unintentional and possibly one of the greatest shots from any documentary ever produced.
  • The Lyre Bird. There's a reason it has over 20 million hits as of early 2020, and counting.
• Moment of Awesome: LAYING among gorillas- eight and a half minutes of wonder.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • This sequence from Planet Earth. (Fair warning: it's about the Cordyceps fungus.)
  • The episode which showed the exploration of underwater caves. Specifically the moment when the diver tried to squeeze through the narrow gap. Claustrophobia mixed with the fear of damaging the life-support equipment to the max.
  • Any time wasps show up in Life in the Undergrowth, you learn facts about those things you'll wish you never did. By the end of that series the word "wasp" will trigger a Pavlovian cringe response.
  • The great white shark attack from Planet Earth, and the lion pride which successfully bring down a baby elephant at night.
  • The dark zone from The Blue Planet. It is indeed, a dark and dangerous world down there.
  • The racer snake attack from Planet Earth II.
  • The Venus Flytrap from Life doubles as both this and Tear Jerker, as it might make you feel bad for the FLIES being eaten by the titular plant.
  • The persistence hunting sequence from the final episode of Life of Mammals would be very terrifying for any animal that gets chased and preyed upon by the primitive tribes that are hunting them, who will not stop for hours until their prey collapses from exhaustion
• Shocking Moments:
  • The breaching killer whales of South America, which first appeared in The Trials of Life and later in The Blue Planet.
  • 2016's sequel, Planet Earth II, is equally as impressive as the original. In particular, the scene where a baby marine iguana makes a miraculous escape from a swarm of racer snakes has received critical acclaim due to its cinematic feel.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Walruses falling off cliffs to their deaths in Our Planet. The behind-the-scenes special shows that the crew was deeply upset by it, with several of them choking up or outright brought to tears as they talk about it on-camera. One of them calls it the worst thing he's ever filmed.
  • Blue Planet II's scene of a mother Pilot Whale carrying her dead calf which may have been poisoned by her own milk after ingesting plastic quickly made shockwaves for its inherent tragedy, showcasing the grief of the mother and her pod, and stark showing of the negative impact plastic pollution can have on marine life.
  • The aftermath of the persistence hunt in the final episode of Life of Mammals.
• Values Dissonance: Acknowledges in Life on Camera that keeping a "pet" ape and eating raw sea turtle eggs isn't as funny in The New Tens as it was in the Fifties.